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I've been listening to TGAOG a lot lately. Which is odd since I don't listen to it much. I am re-falling in love with its era again.

I really love Slutgarden, but also the way from Golden Age of the Grotesque to Spade there is this glitzy, glammy, plastic, nihilistic slide into anger and pain. Plus the way the bass and hooks flow from one to the other makes me always think of taking one long limousine ride from hell, slow disintegrating from the big public anthems and club scene down to the personal andnthe confined.

What GAOG really needed was one or two more tracks in the vein of "Slutgarden" or "Para-Noir"; the last half of the album loses a bit of its focus on decadent midtempo industrial rock and peters out into the big singalong trio of "The Bright Young Things", "Better Of Two Evils" and "Vodevil". And while I think "Vodevil" is terrific, and "The Bright Young Things" should have been a single, I don't think it's controversial to suggest that "Better Of Two Evils" is the weakest song on the album. I feel like that track could have been sacrificed in exchange for another moody industrial song of a kind with the middle third of the record and it would have been an improvement.

Still a great album, though.

To revenge the misdeeds of the ruling class, there existed in the middle ages, in Germany, a secret tribunal, called the “Vehmgericht.” If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the “Vehm.”

All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross.

Agreed with the above points. I also wish there were more songs in the swinging style of "Doll Dagga Buzz Buzz Ziggety Zag". Hell, I think that song was good enough to be a single tbh

It is kind of odd that really only two songs on GAOG directly hearken to the style of music contemporary to the interbellum theme, "Doll-Dagga" and the title track. Even something like the big band styling of "Mutilation Is The Most Sincere Form Of Flattery" would be more at home on GAOG than the album it was actually on. Whereas 100% of Mechanical Animals sounds retro-futuristic, only about 20% of The Golden Age Of Grotesque is a postmodern appropriation of period music.

If Manson had been a bit hungrier and less complacent he could have written an entire album in an industrial swing jazz metal style, maybe similar in spirit (though not exactly in substance) with what his former touring partners Rasputina had done on some of their records. But Marilyn Manson was a commercial project by 2002, and that couldn't really be expected. Still would have been incredibly exciting, amd the apex of his career as a creative force.

Last edited by The Overman; 03-10-2017 at 09:04 PM.

To revenge the misdeeds of the ruling class, there existed in the middle ages, in Germany, a secret tribunal, called the “Vehmgericht.” If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the “Vehm.”

All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross.

I can't believe how many times it needs reiterating that a tawdry rip-off metal swing album was implicitly NOT the intent for The Golden Age Of Grotesque, which is why it doesn't sound like one.

I'm not saying that it was. But a fair bit of GAOG, a fair bit I quite like, is tawdry metal that only bears a lyrical connection to the album's themes.

I understand that a theme album proper could be a bit cheesy. But it's kind of a damned-if-you-do situation: either release a record that's an exact contemporary update of the style you're aping, and be accused of appropriating it because you don't have any ideas of your own, or release one with just a few passing references to the subject matter of the album and risk accusations of laziness (one of the biggest complaints against The Golden Age Of Grotesque that others have is that it loses its musical connection to the interwar theme after the title track and never really recovers it).

Yeah, yeah, the connection with Dadaism, interbellum politics, and all that jazz was less overt than that. I get it. But I don't know that the record really conveys it well by keeping its theme at a distance most of the time. If you wanted to comment more on how stale rap-rock was by 2003, maybe do a few more photoshoots in the Ghetto Dracula drag and don't emphasize top hats and three-pieces quite so much.

Mechanical Animals was handled differently in that there's a 1:1 correlation there between the music and its presentation. You look at the album and expect all glam, all the time, and that's what you get. If The Golden Age Of Grotesque had been handled similarly, it would have been a tawdry swing metal album.

Last edited by The Overman; 03-11-2017 at 05:42 AM.

To revenge the misdeeds of the ruling class, there existed in the middle ages, in Germany, a secret tribunal, called the “Vehmgericht.” If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the “Vehm.”

All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross.

I'm not saying that it was. But a fair bit of GAOG, a fair bit I quite like, is tawdry metal that only bears a lyrical connection to the album's themes.

I understand that a theme album proper could be a bit cheesy. But it's kind of a damned-if-you-do situation: either release a record that's an exact contemporary update of the style you're aping, and be accused of appropriating it because you don't have any ideas of your own, or release one with just a few passing references to the subject matter of the album and risk accusations of laziness (one of the biggest complaints against The Golden Age Of Grotesque that others have is that it loses its musical connection to the interwar theme after the title track and never really recovers it).

Yeah, yeah, the connection with Dadaism, interbellum politics, and all that jazz was less overt than that. I get it. But I don't know that the record really conveys it well by keeping its theme at a distance most of the time. If you wanted to comment more on how stale rap-rock was by 2003, maybe do a few more photoshoots in the Ghetto Dracula drag and don't emphasize top hats and three-pieces quite so much.

Mechanical Animals was handled differently in that there's a 1:1 correlation there between the music and its presentation. You look at the album and expect all glam, all the time, and that's what you get. If The Golden Age Of Grotesque had been handled similarly, it would have been a tawdry swing metal album.

This is why I missed having Overman around. He always conveys what I want to say better than I can lol